OMEGA Concept - managing critical process environmentsContamination of all types creates huge problems in many sectors of industry. OMEGA Concept is a French company which specialises in the prevention of contamination risks, whether nuclear, biological or chemical, to provide its customers with complete control of their production environment.Medical and pharmaceutical facilities, integrated circuit manufacturers and nuclear power plants are typical of the different industries that require 'clean room' facilities to prevent contamination of sensitive process equipment, materials or products. A clean room is a work area with closely controlled temperature, humidity and air filtration. Its design and construction is therefore a specialised process to achieve strict control and maintenance of the room's environmental conditions.Headquartered in Lyon, France, OMEGA Concept is part of GDF SUEZ Energy Services and employs nearly 900 people across its offices in France, Italy and Morocco. It has been a supplier to EDF, the world's largest Owner Operator of nuclear power stations, for more than 30 years and many of its 12 French offices are situated close to EDF nuclear plants.'OMEGA Concept's main activities are the design and installation of high-specification HVAC facilities for clean rooms, and the design and implementation of fluid and cold processes,' explained Yoann Sestier, Commercial Manager of OMEGA's SEMICAD department. 'SEMICAD is our "Specific Engineering" department,' he went on. 'It handles huge turnkey projects, involving project planning, basic and detailed design, calculations, mechanical, thermal and airflow analysis, and space management.'The SEMICAD team's main engineering tool for these projects is AVEVA PDMS, an application within the AVEVA Plant portfolio, which it implemented in 2001. Before that, it used PDS, but the company realised that Intergraph had no plans to further maintain the product. 'We needed a system for the long term,' said Yoann Sestier. 'AVEVA has a strong reputation for its long-term customer commitment and we found PDMS ideally suited to our core engineering disciplines. Besides, old PDS models from earlier projects can easily be imported into PDMS, so we can save time and effort by reusing design information.'Meeting the challenge in nanotechnology'PDMS really came into its own in the construction of NANO 300, a nanotechnology research centre located near Grenoble, France, with a 10,000m2 ISO3 clean room,' Yoann Sestier explained. 'The centre has been in operation since 2002 but this is an ongoing project because the centre is constantly changing. New processes are continually being tested, so the items of process equipment in the clean room have to be frequently moved around or replaced.'OMEGA Concept has also developed its own proprietary system, called MICADO (www.micado-software.com), which is a distribution networks management application, handling information about which equipment is fed by which fluids, and which fluid feeds which equipment, providing a very good view of the entire fluid process. This enables designers to perform different 'what-if' scenarios for equipment items, pipes and fluid processes for individual projects at an early stage, eliminating design errors and subsequent production problems. 'The PDMS geometry for piping and equipment layouts can be imported straight into MICADO,' explained Yoann Sestier. 'We are now extending this to give MICADO access to all the information available in the PDMS models.'MICADO and AVEVA PDMS26AVEVA World Magazine 2012|Issue 1

This state of continuous change means that the PDMS 'Hook-up and Fit-up' design of the plant must be frequently updated to keep the facility functioning optimally. The main constraint on the project is the very tight space in which all these items of process equipment can be moved around from one week to another, while maintaining full flexibility and a tight commissioning schedule. Ten of OMEGA Concept's designers are permanently based at the research centre to carry out the daily design revisions.The PDMS model of this plant is very impressive, with 700 process equipment items in the clean room, more than 40,500 sub-equipment items in the first and second floor basements and more than 150km of pipes, with 5,800 piping lines. About 15,000 isometric drawings are automatically generated from PDMS. The model is kept up to date with the as-built plant and is used for daily production and maintenance. AVEVA World Magazine 2012|Issue 127AVEVA PDMS model of the nanotechnology research centre. Image courtesy of OMEGA Concept.AVEVA PDMS model of a section of the nanotechnology research centre. The clean room is situated on the top floor of the building. Image courtesy of OMEGA Concept.